Accessibility Heuristics

Post from October 7, 2008 (↻ November 6, 2016), reflecting Jens the Developer.

Just having updated my German article on accessibility heuristics it looked useful to share the guidelines over here as well, albeit in a short form. It’s a hat tip to respective documentation by the W3C and IBM. It comes without comments, however; W3C guidelines are sometimes not as precise as they should or could be.

WCAG 2.0 Quick Tips

Make content adaptable, and make it available to assistive technologies.

Use sufficient contrast to make things easy to see and hear.

Operable:

Make all functionality keyboard accessible.

Give users enough time to read and use content.

Do not use content that causes seizures.

Help users navigate and find content.

Understandable:

Make text readable and understandable.

Make content appear and operate in predictable ways.

Help users avoid and correct mistakes.

Robust:

Maximize compatibility with current and future technologies.

IBM

IBM once shared their own set of accessibility recommendations and heuristics that is now, along with more detailed information, offered by the ACM:

Provide meaningful and relevant alternatives to non-text elements.

Support consistent and correctly tagged navigation.

Allow complete and efficient keyboard usage.

Respect users’ browser settings.

Ensure appropriate use of standard and proprietary controls.

Do not rely on color alone to code and distinguish.

Allow users control of potential distractions.

Allow users to understand and control time restraints.

Make certain the website is content compatible with assistive technologies.

About the Author

Jens Oliver Meiert is a German philosopher and developer (Google, W3C, O’Reilly). He experiments with arts and adventure. Here on meiert.com he shares and generalizes and exaggerates some of his thoughts and experiences.

As WCAG 2.0 is still at the candidate recommendation stage, I must admit that my knowledge of it is lacking so it is definitely useful to see it summarised here. One thing I have found useful to help me remember the overall concept is POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust), which I think is a really good way of explaining accessibility in a non-technical way.